


Calypso's Handmaiden

by mercurybard



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-19
Updated: 2010-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-12 00:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercurybard/pseuds/mercurybard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's many a sailor who will tell you about how they stood gape-mouthed at their first sight of King Turner, the pirate lord of Singapore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calypso's Handmaiden

There's many a sailor who'll tell ya about how they stood gape-mouthed at their first sight of King Turner, the pirate lord of Singapore. Sure, every lad who's ever stood a deck has heard 'bout how King Turner sailed with Barbosa to World's End to retrieve Captain Jack Sparrow and fought against Davey Jones during a hurricane blown up by Calypso herself.

But few know that King Turner was once Miss Elizabeth Swann of Port Royale. There's not much of that proper lady left in the pirate king, who dresses like an Oriental cur and swings a sword better than any man who's ever sailed the Gold Coast. When she comes on deck, you best have done your work nice and proper, savvy? Because she's got a cruel streak clean through her bones and brooks no shenanigans. They say she once kissed a man as she sent him straight down to Davey Jones' Locker. I know for a fact that the man was Captain Jack.

All this, any man could know, but ya would have to sail with King Turner to know about the chest she keeps locked in her cabin, the key around her slender neck. It contains the heart of her husband, Will Turner, who sails now as captain of The Flying Dutchman. At night, they say, she curls up around the box, pressing her ear to the side so she can hear the beating of his still living heart the way that most wives cuddle against the sides of their men.

And once a decade, she takes a dingy out to some far island where Caribbean breezes blow warm across white sands. There, she waits for Will to come back out of the sea to her. For one night in ten years, she sheds the trappings of her piracy and stabs her saber into the sand and is simply a woman, loved by a man.

He worships her flesh and marvels over the ways time has changed it since he last laid lips and eyes upon it. Skin bronzes under the southern sun and then darkens to brown until she is almost as dark as her crew. King Turner…no, _Elizabeth_ has come such a long way since she once donned a corset in Port Royale. Now, she rolls in the sand with her husband—her lover—and covers him with shameless kisses.

Will, though…Will does not grow old. The spell of the sea that saved him from Davey Jones' sword traps him in his youth just as it binds him to the Dutchman's wheel, ferrying the souls of those who died at sea. Elizabeth ages as men and women must do, but Will does not, and she fears the day when she is too old for his eyes.

She doesn't know that her husband yearns to grow old with her, beside her. Instead, Will must content himself with brief stolen moments beneath the sun and the knowledge that someday, she will come to him in a spectral dingy, and he will guide her-as he does all those who are buried in the ocean's embrace-into the ever-after.


End file.
